AndreTT

What do people mean when they say 'alcohol stopped working'?
This always confuse me.
It doesnt matter how long, and how much alcohol you've already drunk your life. Pour enough booze down your throat and YOU'RE GONNA GET DRUNK!

BillyPilgrim

Yes you can do that
it takes longer and longer to get that high, and often you go into blackout before you do
we just tend to realise, what is the point?

degadar

I don't think 'getting drunk' is the real intention when you drink. It's more like:
relax, feel more confident, overcome inhibitions, be sociable, that sort of thing.

The getting drunk and falling over and throwing up over your mother-in-law thing stays the same but it's all the perceived benefits of drinking that stopped working for most of us.

Sally1009

Umm, I would say that's true for me. I only drink to cope with depression or insomnia, not to relax or ease social anxiety. But whereas in the past a couple of glasses of wine could knock me out, nowadays I can drink three bottles and still feel quite sober. Apalling. So yes, for me alcohol has stopped working...

Dee74

Oh you can get to a point where alcohol no longer works, Andre - you can drink it all day and it won't change one damn thing, and it won't work on the pain anymore.

That's probably the bleakest most lonely place in the world - and if you've never been there I really hope you never have to be, man...

D

Gottalife

At the start it was the solution to all my problems. Alcohol gave me confidence, took away the fear and anxiety, gave me courage, helped me have fun, be larger than life. In the end it took away my confidence, robbed me of courage, filled me with fear and anxiety, took all the fun out of life, reduced my life to nothing but an endless cycle of shame and humiliation. No matter how much I drank, I couldn't recapture the early fun days. Alcohol no longer worked for me.

kanamit

I don't think anyone would argue that they can no longer get drunk (that's a different thing to having increased tolerance). However, take enough for long enough and you'll find your anxiety starts to go through the roof. Although you still get a pleasurable effect after those first few, the subsequent anxiety and isolation make it feel like alcohol is no longer doing its job. EDIT: I agree with what Dee posted above.

If alcohol really helped people “cope” with depression and other maladies then a) why don't doctors prescribe it as medicine? and b) why can you not drink with anti-depressents? These are subtle excuses used by addicted people to hide behind the fact they only drink for the pleasure, even if said pleasure towards the end, is not what it once was.

Sally, on one hand you say you drink to cope and on the other you say it no longer works. If it no longer works, why do you persist in using it? I am not criticising you, I just wondered if you saw the obvious contradiction in your post.

stillsleeping

Did this stop being one of the perceived benefits? Damn, I am so out of touch...

xxx

BackToSquareOne

Alcohol never loses its ability to get you drunk in the purest sense of the meaning. It does however lose its ability to have the desired effect. I drank for the warm glo, the release from inhibitions, the feeling that all things were possible etc. etc.

If you drink long and hard enough you will no longer be able to reproduce that feeling. Toward the end of my drinking days, which encompassed over 30 years I could no longer recapture those feelings. A half gallon of vodka, coke and eating valium like skittles only made me feel even worse, suicidally depressed if you will.

All of the research I did on the topic seems to point to the fact that after a while the chemicals in the pleasure centers of your brain get so depleted and out of whack that nothing seems to work. You begin a descent into depression and despair that no amount of booze can touch. That's my take on it anyhow.

Sally1009

Kanamit: Yes I do see the contradiction. What has happened recently is that while a couple of glasses of wine does still work to give instantaneous relief from unbearable depression, it no longer acts as a sedative to knock me out. If anything it's more like a stimulant. But because it did work in the past, up til quite recently, I still cling to the hope that it can do so again. Typical alcoholic brain!

2granddaughters

I heard a fella say the other day that it got to the point in his drinking where his body would get drunk but his mind wouldn't.

All the best.

Bob R

BackToSquareOne

That's a good way of putting it. I can only wonder how many people commit suicide in the depths of withdrawal. That's a horrific way to feel, a place I never want to revisit.

LDT

It's been said here before and I will say it again.....I couldn't get drunk and couldn't get sober......all at the same time. Couldn't find that 'click' in my head any more.

DayTrader

I'm with ya Andre.....I've got almost 5yrs sober in AA and I didn't really understand it either.

If you're interested in a 12-step/AA perspective on the exact same question, I posted pretty much the exact same question in the 12-step forum a little while back. Maybe you'll find something helpful in that thread: http://www.soberrecovery.com/forums/...orking-me.html

desertsong

I drank because I liked the "buzz" in the beginning. Once the buzz wore off, I'd try to get it back by drinking more. All it did was get me drunk, then I'd black out and eventually pass out. As time went on, I couldn't even get the buzz anymore. I could down several shots of whiskey and not even feel it but then at some point I'd cross an invisible line and be over-the-edge wasted. At the end, it was no longer the buzz I was seeking but relief from the withdrawal symptoms ... I'd drink so I could feel "normal." I wasn't drunk but I wasn't sober either. I was somewhere in between, which I can only call "purgatory." As Dee said, it is a terrible place to be.

Threshold

I began to self medicate. Thinking it would help me deal with my life. Then it didn't do that anymore. It stopped working for what I started using it for.

Boleo

There was decade or two when it only took 3 - 4 drinks to get a good buzz and I could slow down when I reached that point. Then something changed and it took more and more drinks to get to that point where I felt it was still working for me. Then when it got to the point where it took around 8 -12 drinks, I was still not getting there and would lose count and black-out before I ever got to that sweet-spot.

It was when I lost the ability to find that sweet-spot that I knew "alcohol stopped working for me". Ever since then, 1 drink was too many and a thousand was not enough.

cfm

Their was a time when everytime I drank alcohol I went to a good place. Over time that changed. It became, everytime I drank I wanted to go to a good place, but ended up in a bad place............I'm alergic to alcohol. Everytime I drink it I break out in a rash of court dates

aasharon90

Oh yeah, I defenitely remember when
I had a few good drinks inside me and
my bf signed us up for the dance contest
at our state fair. We practiced and damn
we were good. I could feel it..!

Then it was our time to perform and the
dance seemed to be in slooooow motion.
I just didnt have that good feeling i had
before as alcohol stopped working for me.

I knew were werent gonna win. But hey
that was ok because we had fun for the
most part.

A good buzz at the club, to only lead me
driving home impaired and to this day I dont
really remember if I blacked out or was it due
to fear of getting home late, to running
off the road thru some construction hitting
head on to a concrete culvert sitting on
top the ground.

Yep, i thought alcohol really stopped
working then, but it wasnt enough
to stop drinking forever because that
accident was in Feb. 1990 and in Aug.
1990, in a drunken arguement after
coming in late once again from the club,
on a dare that i would end my life with
a hand full of pain pills, it failed, thank
God and family stepped in with an intervention
that set me on the path of recovery and
journey of a lifetime.

That was 21 yrs ago.

Alcohol quit working for me then, but recovery
is still working for me today.

Nirvana1

It was really clear when alcohol stopped working for me. Let me try to explain:

For the longest time alcohol was an "enhancement" when I drank. I would get more sociable, lose my fears, and my anxiety and even my health temporarily felt better with alcohol. Whenever I drank, I felt that it was something I was choosing to do and thus not something that was controlling me. Even when I was going overboard, since I was making the conscious choice to get drunk, I still felt I was the one in control of "myself" when drinking.

So fast forward to a girlfriend I had. When she drank she absolutely lost all control of herself. I mean she would do and say things that were out of this world insane. She was the absolute sweetest and caring type sober, but right when she started drinking, all hell broke loose.

To me, she was clearly an alcoholic, as it was obvious that the alcohol was directly controlling and changing her. She couldn't stop when she drank, she couldn't control how much, and it was as if the beast of alcohol was even making every decision for her. I could never understand why she would get that way, because it had never really been that way with me or at least that obvious.

Fast forward a couple years, and I slowly noticed that the alcohol was changing me and was starting to take over. For the longest time my biggest problem was the morning hangover after a night of drinking. My health had been bad for a long time, so I felt bad the next day a lot anyways, so I didn't blame the drinking for how crappy I felt the next morning.

What started happening was what a lot of people are describing of alcohol "not working anymore". Instead of drinking taking me to that "happy place", I was busting right through to out-of-control thinking and actions. I would not experience much of the benefits anymore, and would a lot of times just black out or be taken to a dark place. I started setting rules to try and combat the out-of-controlness, but there was no way of controlling it for me anymore, especially when I started drinking when depressed or sad, etc.

I guess some people (like my ex) are 100% out of control from the get go, so never understand what in control or "stopped working" really means. They have no other experience of it "working". Some people can binge drink and "stay in control" sometimes, but most of the time go overboard, and others may experience something similar to me in that they once had some control, but progressed into alcohol "not working" and changing them for the worse.

The bottom line is everyone is completely different and we will all have different experiences with alcohol. If you are having a problem with alcohol and it is causing problems, it doesn't matter if you're one of the types where alcohol is "still working", because you are just experiencing a different type of alcoholism. Keep looking for situations that relate to your own problem drinking and focus on your recovery that way.